


We Carry The Dead In Our Hands

by i_claudia



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Character Death, F/M, M/M, POV Multiple, Reincarnation, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-20
Updated: 2010-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_claudia/pseuds/i_claudia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>We carry the dead in our hands.<br/>There is no other way.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Carry The Dead In Our Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ [here](http://i-claudia.livejournal.com/61636.html). (20 November 2010)

_v._

“Mrs. Pendragon,” the uniformed man at her door says when she opens it, and Gwen doesn’t have to see the expression on his face or the telegram in his hands to _know_.

The world sways, realigns, and continues on as she and the officer stare at each other, both wishing they were anywhere else. There’s something odd in her ears, a curious muffled distance, when the officer holds out the telegram. She takes it; doesn’t open it. She doesn’t need to.

“Arthur was a good man,” he says simply, and she nods, taking the thin envelope without a word. She’s seen so many of these delivered to the doorsteps of other lives, enough that it all seems a terrible farce, a script so well-worn it’s easy to blur the sharpness of the dialogue, the immediacy of the theater lights.

“You were with him,” she says, because she recognizes him now, this thick-browed, square-jawed officer, has seen him in the folded photo Arthur had sent, months before, the two of them laughing somewhere against a colorless desert. The officer bows his head, turns to leave, but she calls out to him, impulsive. “Won’t you—won’t you come in for a minute?”

There’s no hesitation when he answers, only smooth politeness. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Please,” she says, holding the door open for him. “It’s Gwen.” He sits on the sofa Arthur brought home for her just after their honeymoon; he holds his back stiff and straight, his cap balanced carefully on his knees.

There’s no coffee, hasn’t been, and though she’s sure there’s tea somewhere she can’t find it, vanished with the last of the sugar she’s been hoarding. She turns to him, flustered, and when he assures her: “A glass of water, please,” she brings him her biggest glass. She studies him as he drinks it, wonders if he’ll be going back to the war, if he has anyone at home to worry over him, wonders if he has children who shape laborious letters to send across oceans for him, learning the spellings and spacings of the world without him, his absence more defining than his presence ever could be.

That, at least, is a blessing. She isn’t blind, had always noticed the looks Arthur pretended he wasn’t giving other couples, secure, strolling with carriages and toddlers trailing behind; they’d told each other they didn’t need all of that—think of the mess, the tantrums, heavens no!—a mutual falsehood she’s glad for now, though it isn’t any comfort.

The officer finishes the water, and they sit together in silence, tied together by it, though already it’s losing its terrible edge. There’s an ache where tenderness used to burrow through her being, but even now she knows it will be bearable, even when it sharpens in the first spring-green rain, the spicy dry breath of autumn. She nearly asks about Arthur, about the Arthur this man had known... but that isn’t the Arthur she wants to remember, not the one she loved. The man who gave his last full measure gladly will always be a stranger to her. She’ll stay with the Arthur who sat with her in his father’s leather chair until the dent in it shifted to fit their bodies, the Arthur who promised her grand adventures before fire and bullets took that dream away from them, tugging a different Arthur to follow.

“Thank you for the water,” the soldier says, gently, and she realizes too late she’s been staring, vacant, on the cusp of trembling.

“Of course,” she says. She can feel the briskness coming back to her arms and elbows. Tonight she’ll take her own gold star and hang it in the window—not proudly, she still can’t bear the pride she knows she is supposed to feel—but with gravity and grace. Arthur would have liked that. She shows the officer to the door, stands and watches the car pull away from her door, and it’s only later, washing his glass, that she remembers she’d forgotten to even ask his name. 

It doesn’t take long to find Arthur’s picture, the one with sand filling up every corner, and written on the back in neat, measured letters, she finds: _Arthur and Lance_. No date or place; just a black mark where the censor must have scratched it out. She sets the photo on Arthur’s chair. The leather still warm from the afternoon sun, and she perches on the arm, running a hand down the familiar butter brownness of the back. Just resting, she thinks, laying her head down while the sun slips out of sight, leaving its orange trailing behind to mix with purple-blue clouds. She’ll only sit for a moment, closing her eyes to hold onto the warmth, before the world spins on.

*

_iv._

You couldn’t help but love Pendragon, no one could, which is why Lance is here in this slick government car, rolling past quiet streets with their rows of carefully ordered houses, each painted a different color: sensible blues and grays and greens, now and then a daring butter-yellow. They all look beige to him, the life washed right out of them.

He shouldn’t be here, not really, it’s not his job, but he’s a goddamn decorated war hero, so they let him do what he wants, and what he doesn’t want is Pendragon’s widow finding out from some bored lackey who doesn’t know shit about Pendragon, the man he was.

Lance avoids looking at the front windows they pass. He doesn’t want to know what prices these families, these neighborhoods have paid in blood. He doesn’t want to see how many of those proud blue stars have changed to gold.

Arthur’s house isn’t extravagant, but it manages to breathe money nevertheless, the crisp corners of it stern and well-kept, the lawn carefully tended. Lance can see a garden in the back, its tomatoes just starting to blush from the honey-sweet touch of summer sun. He isn’t surprised by the structured elegance of it all; Pendragon is no slouch, and it stands to reason his family’s the same.

_Was_ , Lance remembers, and it’s like shrapnel in his gut all over again, little agonies tearing deeper beneath his skin.

“This is the house, sir,” the driver says, as if Lance hadn’t already guessed that.

“Yes,” he says shortly, and doesn’t get out. He stares at the house for a few minutes more, fighting to control the uncomfortable, nervous feeling in his gut before shaking himself and opening the car door, stepping out onto the smooth sidewalk. He takes a breath, squares his shoulders, and makes sure his hat is tucked neatly under his arm. The telegram he holds between two fingers, lightly, but it still feels like it’s burning his skin, faintly, just enough to be uncomfortable; he knows the sensation is all in his head but he can’t shake it.

The walk to the front door is too long, gives him too much time to think about what might come when the door opens: tears or denial or blind shock, testing every wall he’s built up to protect himself. He’s seen photos of Arthur’s girl, his wife, knows she’s a dark-eyed beauty with curls, enough to send his own heart beating a little faster even if she is out of his reach. Back then he’d ribbed Pendragon plenty, covered his own desire with comedy and teasing; now there’s a solemnity pressing cold over that, a delicate veneer over the grief he will not allow himself to indulge yet.

He takes another breath, and knocks.

*

_iii._

Merlin doesn’t need to see the body to know what’s happened—news travels fast here, from signal to mouth to the ears of everyone in the company and probably every spy with ears in Europe—but he needs to see to accept it, to knock away the frozen shell of disbelief that rolled over his shoulders at the first whispers and hardened into place when confirmation came down from the front.

He watches all evening and into the night, waiting, until they bring the body down like all the others, slung over the rump of a solemn mule. Arthur would have hated it, Merlin thinks, the indignity of it, though he would have hidden that with swaggering braggadocio, made a joke out of it with laughter. The porters sling the body carefully down off of the mule before trudging back into the mountains, and Merlin stares at it, waiting for acceptance to sink in. It never does.

Lifetimes, _lifetimes_ , he has spent waiting, and it always comes to this: to Arthur lying still in the moonlight, dust slowly dulling his uniform, rust-dark stains spread wide and final over his breast. His eyes, at least, are mercifully closed.

_Arthur_.

It’s a heartcry welling up inside, a last scream from the sour fear and crumbling remains of hope Merlin has held onto for too long, but he keeps his back rigid, holds himself steady: he cannot betray them now, not ever. Not that there is anything to betray except stolen kisses, Arthur’s own fear and guilt after one terrified night in an abandoned shack somewhere in the desert, but Merlin knows even the slightest whisper of rumour would have mortified Arthur, destroyed some tender thing inside him. Arthur, who remembered nothing of the lives before, who always teetered on the brink of crushing the hidden soft places which did still remember Merlin’s touch.

Merlin kneels by Arthur’s body, spends a long time just looking at this so-familiar, beloved face, his fingers resting lightly on Arthur’s shoulder. They shake a little, and he presses down harder to steady them, feeling his breath sharp and ragged in his chest. The light has already gone from Arthur, leached away by death’s cold water, leaving the body sunken somehow, too still and severe. Still, Merlin runs his hands over Arthur’s collar, smoothing it carefully. It’s the kind of intimacy Arthur never allowed himself in this lifetime, one last indulgence Merlin takes before standing, every bone in his body heavy, protesting the rise.

He ignores the urge to stay there, turns his back on it instead, on this body that is no longer Arthur. Arthur is gone again, lost somewhere in the universe while the bones and flesh and sinew he left behind begin their slow return to dust. The pattern keeps repeating, a slow torture meant for Merlin alone: each time hope is renewed, each time Arthur comes back to him, he’s never sure if this time is meant to be the last, never knows if they have years or minutes left.

He walks away, heading blindly for anywhere that isn’t here, that isn’t full of the stench of blood and battle and dying men. Already he is waiting, knows he’ll wait as long as it takes for Arthur to return again. He sticks his hands in his pockets, leaves his gun leaning against a broken wooden post, doesn’t look back once at what he’s left behind.

*

_ii._

Mordred didn’t volunteer because he enjoys battle. He hates this war, loathes it all with the frustrated passion of a life stopped in its tracks, but he’ll fight anyway, fire his gun until death comes for him as well. He isn’t fighting for a higher cause; he leaves that to the politicians and the story-spinners. He fights because he has a mother at home, because he’s seen the aftermath of enemy bombs, of the enemy’s justice, because he has a duty to the people who cannot protect themselves.

He literally trips over the soldier in the dark. The man—an officer, Mordred assumes from the decorations on his uniform, though he can’t tell what rank—is very still, and at first Mordred thinks he’s already dead. There’s an odd, steady look in his eyes, though, which gives Mordred pause: a calmness that sets him apart from all the empty gaping horror Mordred has seen on the faces of too many dead men. Mordred’s not sure how the man has survived this long, not when he’s been sitting with a gut wound, still bleeding sluggishly, presumably since the Allies retreated a full day before, but there’s no time to ponder that, not with his company marching ahead without him through the thick Italian night.

He doesn’t think much about it at the time. Later, he’ll tell himself it was for the best; that the man was dying in slow agony anyway. Mordred’s no stranger to the horrors of the body, of death, knows when a man is beyond saving. But he can’t deny the pleasure of it, either, a vicious satisfaction at seeing the man slump over that seems to spring from roots deeper than the simple fear of a faceless enemy. It feels like an insult amended, the long-held thirst of a grudge finally slaked. Later, he’ll forget about it, about the way his blood is singing in the light from the warm, waning sliver of the moon, about the inexplicable triumph bearing him up, but for now he only settles his pack more firmly on his shoulders and jogs after his comrades. There is far more to do than celebrate one dead enemy.

*

_i._

Arthur is going to _kill_ Merlin.

He doesn’t blame the young German with Mordred’s face—and that isn’t right, it can’t be, because Mordred should be back in Camlann, desperate and full of rage and twisted beyond saving. Mordred doesn’t come looming out of the dark of an olive grove to stare at Arthur with a face full of fear and desperate hesitation, and Arthur doesn’t belong in this uniform, shouldn’t be looking at these hills which are foreign and familiar all at once while his heart goes slowly, stutteringly still.

He really is going to kill Merlin. Merlin, who never told him. Merlin, who always knows and suffers stupidly for it, who Arthur had spent hours sneaking glances at without once understanding why, because Merlin has always been—will always be—an idiot.

It’s all confused, jumbled in his woozy brain, though that might just be from the bullets, the pain which isn’t pain anymore. It isn’t the first time Arthur has died, though he hadn’t known that before now, and it always feels the same: a slow lingering even after his body stops drawing breath, a gentle fade into darkness. He thinks maybe it’s supposed to be a comfort, an apology of sorts for ripping him out of the world over and over again, but he’d rather just be gone instead of having this time to think, to regret.

He doesn’t regret Gwen, doesn’t think he ever could in any lifetime. He loves her just as fiercely as he always has, and though it’s different than the way he loves Merlin it isn’t any weaker. It’s an uncomfortable balance, an uncomfortable sort of thought. Arthur’s been proud of his reputation with the men as honest, truthful; they know he’ll have no truck with straying from them just as he’d never strayed from his wife... except that he _had_ strayed, had felt his will weaken after months of horror far from the warm comfort of home.

It’s been a grinding itch beneath his skin since it happened; now he wonders if he would have allowed himself more if he’d realized earlier, if Merlin had told him. He remembers the other lives now, lives between this one and the first: lives with Gwen and without her but always, always with Merlin. Every life from the first is full of Merlin, giving himself over to Arthur entirely in secret or out loud.

He looks up at the stars—funny, the clouds had been low and heavy, full and groaning with the threat of rain earlier—resigned because it doesn’t matter now, any of it. This life is finished with him; he can feel it dissolving, scents and sights and sounds growing pale, echoing shadows of themselves under the heavy velvet darkness of a further night. Arthur can’t feel his legs anymore, and when he tries to move his fingers they barely twitch. The only thing he can feel is Merlin, Merlin’s presence somewhere out there below the first line of hills. 

He tilts his head back, focusing on Merlin, wrapping a narrow tendril of himself around that light before the darkness slips over his eyes: a promise.

He’ll be back.

**Author's Note:**

> Dual inspiration from this fic came from Ernie Pyle's essay "The Death of Captain Waskow" and John Glenday's poem "Portage":
> 
>  
> 
> "I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
> 
> "Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.
> 
> "[...] The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip [...] Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road [...]
> 
> "Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
> 
> "And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone."
> 
> *
> 
>   _We carry the dead in our hands.  
>  There is no other way._
> 
> _The dead are not carried in our memories. They died  
>  in another age, long before this moment.  
> We shape them from the wounds  
> they left on the inanimate,  
> ourselves, as falling water  
> will turn stone into a bowl._
> 
> _There is no room in our hearts  
>  for the dead, though we often imagine that there is,  
> or wish it to be so,  
> to preserve them in our warmth,  
> our sweet darkness, where their fists  
> might beat at the soft contours of our love.  
> And though we might like to think  
> that they would call out to us, they could never do so,  
> being there. They would never dare to speak,  
> lest their mouths, our names, fill  
> quietly with blood._
> 
> _We carry the dead in our hands  
>  as we might carry water - with a careful,  
> reverential tread.  
> There is no other way._
> 
> _How easily, how easily their faces spill._


End file.
